But can humans do that? If you show someone a picture of a cat, can they "explain" why is it a cat and not a dog or a pumpkin?
And is that explanation the way how they obtained the "cat-nes" of the picture, or do they just see that it is a cat immediately and obviously and when you ask them for an explanation they come up with some explaining noises until you are satisfied?
Wild cat, house cat, lynx,...? Sure, they can. They will tell you about proportions, shape of the ears, size as compared to other objects in the picture etc.
For cat vs pumpkin they will think you are making fun of them, but it very much is explainable. Though now I am picturing a puzzle about finding orange cats in a picture of a pumpkin field.
> They will tell you about proportions, shape of the ears, size as compared to other objects in the picture etc.
But is that how they know that the image is a cat, or is that some after the fact tacked on explaining?
Let me tell you an example to better explain what I mean. There are these “botanical identifying” books. You take a speciment unknown to you and and it asks questions like “what shape the leaves are?” “Is the stem woody or not?” “How many petals on the flower?” And it leads you through a process and at the end gives you ideally the specific latin name of the species. (Or at least narrows it down.)
Vs the act of looking at a rose and knowing without having to expend any further energy that it is a rose. And then if someone is questioning you you can spend some energy on counting petals, and describing leaf shapes and find the thorns and point them out and etc.
It sounds like most people who want “explainable AI” want the first kind of thing. The blind and amnesiac botanist with the plant identifying book. Vs what humans are actually doing which is more like a classification model with a tacked on bulshit generator to reason about the classification model’s outputs into which it doesn’t actually have any in-depth insight.
And it gets worse the deeper you ask them. How do you know that is an ear? How do you know its shape? How do you know the animal is furry?
Shown a picture of a cloud,
why it looks like a cat does sometimes need an explanation until others can see the cat, and it's not just "explaining noises".
And is that explanation the way how they obtained the "cat-nes" of the picture, or do they just see that it is a cat immediately and obviously and when you ask them for an explanation they come up with some explaining noises until you are satisfied?